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      in Tennis

      Tennis, Everyone?

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      Furi Sport, a new tennis equipment and fashion line, wants to do nothing less than change the game.The first time Erick Mathelier visited Greenwich, Conn., was an eye-opening experience.“The houses were humongous,” he recalled, sitting outside a Lower East Side cafe one morning in June. “I was like, ‘Wow, people live like this?’” To the eyes of a teenager from the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, Greenwich was a window to a different world, one where the houses weren’t just bigger, the dreams were.His first glimpse of this rarefied enclave on the Long Island Sound came through tennis, in a van on the way to an Ivan Lendl tennis club for a match.Tennis was a gateway for Mr. Mathelier. He recalled his first time on an airplane at age 14 for a trip to a tournament in Bermuda. “It’s funny, I was teased because I was so scared to fly, and by 14 most of my friends had flown,” he said. The sport was his ticket to a scholarship to a Division 1 college, Saint Francis in Brooklyn Heights. Two decades later, Mr. Mathelier, now 42, is a tennis professional — off the court.Last month, he introduced Furi Sport, an equipment — rackets, strings, overgrips and bags — and apparel line with his business partner Michelle Spiro. The idea behind the company is to break down the entry barrier to tennis, to shake off the elitist country-club flavor that insulates the world of Wimbledon and its all-white dress code.Black is the defining color of the Furi Sport T-shirts, hoodies, bags and rackets. At $199, the rackets are priced with inclusivity in mind, competitive with, yet slightly below, the top of the competition (Prince, Head, Wilson, Yonex, Babolat). Mr. Mathelier knows from experience that tennis can take you places, if you can gain access to it.How Others LiveMr. Mathelier grew up in a predominantly Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn, the only son of a single mother from Haiti. He was an active child whose first love was baseball. As a 10-year-old, he was one of two African American kids on a team in Sheepshead Bay.Then, in the summer of 1989, Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager from East New York, was brutally murdered by a mob of white kids in Bensonhurst. As racial tension surged in the city, Mr. Mathelier’s mother pulled him out of baseball, fearful that Yusef Hawkins’s tragic fate would befall her son.“I was so sad,” Mr. Mathelier said. “I needed something to do.” Deeming himself too short for basketball, he set his sights on tennis. Why? He’s not sure. His mother told him to crack open the Yellow Pages and find a way to play, which led him to the Prospect Park Tennis Center.The tennis club, situated at the nexus of the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Little Caribbean and Crown Heights — which at the time was years away from being gentrified — drew a diverse bunch.“Just seeing how people lived definitely changed my perspective,” Mr. Mathelier said.Mr. Mathelier had no professional tennis ambitions until he met Ms. Spiro by chance at a fashion event in 2014. By then, he had hung up his racket to focus on a series of start-ups.Ms. Spiro, 53, spent 25 years in corporate fashion in increasingly senior buying and sales roles at Macy’s, DKNY, Polo Ralph Lauren Underwear and Calvin Klein Men’s Underwear — companies that were held by public giants like Sara Lee and Warnaco. By 2015, she had become intrigued by the street wear movement.“The luxury market was all about showing how much money you have through what you were buying,” Ms. Spiro said. “What I loved about street wear is that it was this exclusive inclusivity. The currency changed from cash to being in the know.”Mr. Mathelier’s teenage tennis journey resonated with Ms. Spiro, who observed that Supreme, Palace and A Bathing Ape were anchored in skateboarding. Moncler and The North Face grew out of outdoor recreation, and Carhartt and Timberland were backed by construction. Tennis had no street cred.Ms. Spiro called Mr. Mathelier and said, “I have this crazy idea.” How about a rare Black- and female-owned tennis brand, based in New York City and built on the idea of taking the sport out of the country club?The company’s clothing collection speaks to tennis’s off-court culture.via FURI SportThe vibe is more streetwear than country club.via FURI SportTennis for EveryoneHigh-quality, competitive equipment was central to the idea. But there’s a reason the sport is dominated by a handful of big brands. “Everyone is just stuck with what equipment that they’re used to,” said Mr. Mathelier, who was committed to Prince before founding Furi. “Even though they may complain about the newer version of their racket, they just play with it.”Then there’s the fact that what looks like a relatively simple piece of equipment requires navigating a byzantine network of Asian manufacturing cliques. Ms. Spiro and Mr. Mathelier enlisted his childhood friend from Prospect Park Tennis Center, Gerald Sarmiento, a pro-shop owner, coach and master stringer who knows the nuances of rackets better than his own backhand. He told them not to bother unless they came to the market with something that gives the player an “ooh-ahh feeling,” Mr. Mathelier recalled.When it came time to develop a racket, Mr. Sarmiento connected them with Yasu Sakamoto, a Japanese racket maestro with 40 years of experience consulting for companies including Wilson.Through several years of development, frustrating trials and errors, they landed on a proprietary design with energy return technology and vibration reduction technology that gave Mr. Sarmiento that special feeling. Two models, a lite and a pro version, are for sale on the Furi Sport website.The next challenge was recruiting other players. “People would be like, ‘Oh, that’s cute,’” Mr. Mathelier said of pitching Furi’s racket. Once, at the McCarren Park courts in Brooklyn, he approached a friend and her hitting partner.“He looked at me like I was a traveling salesperson with my trunk,” Mr. Mathelier said. “Well, now he plays with Furi.”For every dismissal, there was someone willing to help. A tweet sent to Caitlin Thompson, the publisher of the independent tennis magazine Racquet, led to a meeting. “We became hitting partners because I was really intrigued about the idea of new equipment in the space,” said Ms. Thompson, who has used the Furi rackets, grips and bags.She sees Furi’s opportunity in its positioning as a beginner-friendly option for recreational players, a rare direct-to-consumer brand (think of what Casper did for mattresses) in a market steeped in pro-shop culture.“So much of tennis is catered toward this notion of professional athletes,” Ms. Thompson said. “This is a racket that Roger Federer plays with. This is the racket that Serena Williams plays with.” She said that Mr. Federer’s racket is so heavy, most recreational players can’t lift it above their heads. Yet pro shops can’t keep it in stock because he plays with it.The Social ComponentFor Mr. Mathelier, Furi is a tool to reach kids growing up in circumstances similar to his own. Junior rackets will be coming for fall. Furi is sponsoring three junior tennis players — Carter Smallwood, Olivia Medrano and Bode Vujnovich — and donates grips, strings and rackets to youth programs, including Kings County Tennis League, which began in 2010, when its founder Michael McCasland posted a sign offering free tennis lessons on a dilapidated court near the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It has since grown into a tennis program for kids living in Brooklyn public housing that serves more than 200 people.“You can use tennis to get out,” Mr. Mathelier said. “It is really good at creating structure, building strategy. A lot of former tennis players end up becoming successful businesspeople.”The lifestyle portion of Furi Sport draws on Ms. Spiro’s expertise. Luis Santos, a designer who has worked for Christian Lacroix, Kenzo and Paco Rabanne, created a collection of clothing that is not performance wear — that’s still in development — but speaks to tennis’s broader, off-court culture. T-shirt dresses, shirts with cutout shoulders and wide-leg, tapered khakis and cargo pants can be worn by anyone heading to a post-match drink. Or anyone who wants to be in Furi’s club.A blue tennis ball with a smirk is Furi Sport’s trademark, “symbolizing the fierce energy and velocity that comes from within,” according to the company’s website. The name Furi was chosen partly because “fury” evokes an attitude of fire-in-the-belly grit essential to a sport in which every match results in one winner and one loser.“You have to be comfortable with losing,” Mr. Mathelier said. “We have a saying internally,” Mr. Mathelier said. “‘Dream big and let it fly.’” He directed attention to his forearm, where those words have been immortalized in a subtle, faded tattoo. More

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      in Tennis

      At Wimbledon, Ashleigh Barty Pays Tribute to a Forebear

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      Barty, the top women’s seed at Wimbledon, asked her apparel sponsor to design an outfit that paid tribute to Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the first Indigenous Australian woman to win the tournament.WIMBLEDON, England — As the top-seeded Ashleigh Barty looked forward to Wimbledon this year, she also looked back half a century. To another Indigenous woman from Australia. To a groundbreaking Wimbledon title. And, ultimately, to a hemline. More

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      in Basket

      Kobe Bryant’s Nike Contract Expired. The Implications Are Complex.

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      The end of the deal has no analogue in basketball or sneaker history, opening a hole in the market as Bryant’s shoes have been used heavily by N.B.A. athletes and have seen high demand among the public since his death.The most popular shoes on the N.B.A. hardwood for the last several seasons were not the signature sneakers endorsed by the top active players, like Nike’s LeBron James or Adidas’s Damian Lillard. They were not the shoes endorsed by the man who practically invented the modern sneaker game, Michael Jordan.Instead they were Nike’s line of Kobe Bryant’s signature sneakers, which were worn by 103 players last season — about 20 percent of the league’s players — according to the sneaker website Baller Shoes DB. Many W.N.B.A. players, like the Seattle Storm’s Jewell Loyd, also wear Bryant’s signature sneakers.But soon those players will need to find new shoes, at least if they want to play in brand-new pairs. Nike confirmed Monday that its contract with the estate of Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash last year, expired last week.“Kobe Bryant was an important part of Nike’s deep connection to consumers,” a Nike spokesman, Josh Benedek, said in a statement. “He pushed us and made everyone around him better. Though our contractual relationship has ended, he remains a deeply loved member of the Nike family.”In the uncertainty over Bryant’s continued endorsement deal for basketball shoes and apparel, a number of issues collide: what professional basketball players wear on the court, the demand from consumers for Bryant merchandise and how a person’s name and image are used, even after their death.Nike has a short window in which it can continue selling the shoes and apparel featuring Bryant that it has already manufactured, but soon that merchandise will disappear from Nike’s website and store shelves.Switching shoe companies is not uncommon for top basketball players, whose sneaker contracts can pay tens of millions of dollars annually and rival or even exceed their N.B.A. contracts in value. Bryant signed with Adidas before he entered the N.B.A., in 1996, then signed with Nike in 2003 after his Adidas deal ended. Even as some major sponsors dropped Bryant when he was accused of sexual assault, Nike, which had signed Bryant shortly before he was arrested, stood by him.The current situation with Bryant’s estate has no analogue in basketball or sneaker history. Signature basketball shoes really only began to gain prominence in the late 1980s, and barely any N.B.A. superstars from that era or later have died, let alone at a young age like Bryant, who was 41.Different versions of Nike shoes were left at a mural honoring Bryant shortly after his death.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe closest comparisons are perhaps Chuck Taylor, the namesake of Converse’s famed Chuck Taylor All-Stars, whose shoes remain popular 50 years after his death, or Maya Moore, the W.N.B.A. star and Jordan Brand endorser, who has sat out the past few seasons to focus on social justice. But the strained analogies suggest the past provides little hint of what will happen next.Almost all N.B.A. players are endorsed by one sneaker company or another. But only a handful have lines of shoes named after them, fewer have popular lines that sell tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of merchandise annually and even fewer stay popular in retirement. In the 1990s, a handful of W.N.B.A. stars had shoe deals, including Sheryl Swoopes, who was the first female athlete to have a signature basketball sneaker.Nike clearly believed that Bryant’s appeal extended into retirement, signing him to a new five-year agreement on the day of his final N.B.A. game: April 13, 2016. Bryant played his final season in the Kobe 11s, the 11th edition of his sneaker line. After his retirement, Nike released a new line of sneakers styled as Kobe A.D., or anno Domini, the Latin phrase that means “in the year of the Lord.”Nike’s Jordan brand, and its continued release of Air Jordan sneakers, remains quite popular, but as everyday fashion shoes; N.B.A. players rarely wear Air Jordans during games these days. Bryant attempted to buck that trend in retirement, with Nike releasing Bryant “protro” shoes: retro Bryant shoes updated with modern professional performance features.While they were popular with basketball players, Bryant’s sneakers were not always the most popular off the court, worn with jeans or sweats.Before Bryant’s death, the market for his shoes was fairly niche, said Chad Jones, the co-founder of Another Lane, a marketplace for sneaker collectors. “Performance wise, a lot of performance athletes loved Kobe shoes, but fashion wise is really the predictor for how well it will sell to the masses,” Jones said.Nike did not sign Bryant to what is effectively a lifetime contract, like it has done with Jordan and James, raising questions about how much continued value it saw in his name. The Kobe shoes N.B.A. players wore were often limited editions or unique colors that average consumers could not buy, partly explaining why their popularity on the court did not necessarily translate to popularity on the street.Since Bryant’s death, Nike has released new Bryant merchandise, but mostly in limited quantities through its SNKRS app. The shoes have sold out almost immediately, and then showed up for much higher prices on resale markets, leading to accusations that Nike was allowing resellers to profit from Bryant’s death.“When people don’t get them on retail, but on a resale platform for five times or two times the price, they are upset,” Jones said.In a statement posted to Instagram on Monday night, Vanessa Bryant, Kobe’s widow, wrote that she was “hoping to forge a lifelong partnership with Nike that reflects my husband’s legacy,” and hinted that she will find a way to continue to sell Bryant’s products, perhaps in greater quantities.Vanessa Bryant during the memorial for her husband, Kobe Bryant, and their daughter Gianna Bryant last February.Robert Hanashiro/USA Today Sports, via Reuters“My hope will always be to allow Kobe’s fans to get and wear his products,” she wrote. “Kobe’s products sell out in seconds. That says everything.”If Vanessa Bryant cannot come to an agreement with Nike on a new contract, building a new brand around Kobe could be a challenge. Nike, including brands it owns like Jordan Brand and Converse, controls more than half the sneaker market, with companies like Adidas and Puma as distant competitors. Under Armour, which is endorsed by Golden State’s Stephen Curry, has struggled to break through.Many sneakers are promoted through elaborate back stories about how the player inspired specific design details or guided the design process, and through player-focused advertising campaigns.But what really sells sneakers is players’ connection to culture, or the feelings they evoke in potential consumers, not necessarily winning N.B.A. championships or a shoe’s performance features. Allen Iverson’s rebellious, me-against-the-world persona made his “Answer” shoes from Reebok popular sellers in the 2000s, even though he never won an N.B.A. title.Bryant was not always a popular player, and his early shoes were not top sellers. Through repeated trips to China and success in the Olympics he found fame outside of America’s borders, and as he aged a generation of players entered an N.B.A. that revered him.If the year since his death has shown anything, it is that even into retirement Bryant’s popularity was growing as he made new connections in Hollywood, opened a sports academy and became a prominent and vocal supporter of women’s basketball. More

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      in Soccer

      Soccer Samples Streetwear and Likes the Fit

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      Juventus reimagined its look, P.S.G. partnered with Jordan Brand, and now Arsenal and Inter Milan are following suit. But soccer’s interest in design has little to do with the sport.The lights at the Allianz Stadium cut out, and the music swelled. In the darkness, a small patch in the middle of the field seemed to glow. The center circle started to pulse and ripple. And then the grass itself appeared to get pulled away, as if it were nothing more than a tablecloth. Three words ran around the electronic advertising boards: “History. Passion. Lols.”The extravagant buildup did not seem to match the occasion. Juventus was at home to Genoa that night, a run-of-the-mill Serie A game. It was late October 2019, much too early in the season for the title to be decided or a trophy to be won. What mattered, though, was not what Juventus was playing for, but what the team was playing in.That night, Cristiano Ronaldo and his teammates would showcase a special edition jersey, designed in collaboration with its apparel partner, Adidas, and Palace, the maverick British skate and streetwear brand.The design toyed with the history and passion of Juventus, incorporating the team’s traditional bianconero stripes and the disruptive touches that had made Palace a streetwear phenomenon. The team’s logos and the player’s numbers were displayed in an acidic green. Toward the bottom, the stripes started to pixelate.The jersey was greeted as a masterpiece, but Juventus would never wear it again. By the time Ronaldo and his teammates took to the field against Torino a few days later, they were back in their regular uniforms. It did not matter. Later that week, the Palace jersey came online — or, as the streetwear world would put it, dropped.It sold out in 12 hours.Soccer goes popP.S.G. and Jordan Brand released their first collaboration in 2018.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA couple of years earlier, Juventus had held a lavish reception at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. The guest list included players past and present, but also pop-culture fixtures like Giorgio Moroder, the pioneering music producer, and the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski.The party was arranged to herald the dawn of a new era for the club. Its team was in the middle of an unmatched period of success on the field, establishing a run of dominance in Serie A, however, it risked being left behind by its Continental rivals. To remain competitive, it needed to close the revenue gap on clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United, its chairman, Andrea Agnelli said. To do that, he was convinced, Juventus had to become “more pop.”He is not the only executive in European soccer to have that thought. In 2018, fans lined up around the block outside the Parc des Princes to get their hands on the first drop of a collaboration between Paris St.-Germain and Jordan Brand, a subsidiary of its primary apparel partner, Nike. Earlier this year, Arsenal unveiled a collaboration with 424, a streetwear brand based in Los Angeles.As with the audience for Juventus’s collection with Palace, the core market for these collaborations is not the club’s fans. It is not even, necessarily, fans of the sport. The collections are not intended to be worn as soccer products or as declarations of loyalty to a team; the tie-ins are not, as they are often presented, attempts by Europe’s insatiable superclubs to sell more tickets or to pick up more fans.The Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli oversaw a complete rebranding of the club.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“A lot of the people buying those P.S.G. Jordan shirts will not care about the team’s league position,” said Jordan Wise, a founder of Gaffer magazine and the creative agency False 9. “Many of them may not even like football.” That is precisely their value to clubs: an entirely untapped market, one not subject to the vicissitudes and tribalism that affect soccer fans.“Working with streetwear brands gives the clubs access to a completely different space,” Wise said. “But to do that, they have to think and look different: less like clubs, and more like sportswear brands.”No team has embraced that shift quite like Juventus. In 2016, at Agnelli’s instigation, the club decided to embark on a comprehensive rebrand. Every aspect of the team’s identity would be in play, including, most controversially, its iconic crest, a symbol that had roots stretching back more than a century.“It was more than just a change in the badge,” said Giorgio Ricci, Juventus’s chief financial officer. “It was a new visual identity, one which would enable us to be seen as innovative, one step ahead.”The club put the rebrand idea out to a number of marketing agencies, and eventually selected a pitch from Interbrand, a longstanding partner. Its approach had been risky: After consulting the company’s global network of creatives, Lidi Grimaldi, the managing director of Interbrand’s Milan bureau, decided against presenting the club with a suite of options, spreading their bets in the hopes that one caught the imagination.Instead, she said, Interbrand decided to go in with one design. Though the company had previously helped tweak the Juventus crest, making it a little less ornate, altering the color scheme a touch, this time Interbrand would suggest something more revolutionary. “Something really bold,” she said. Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMarco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey did not have much time. Because Juventus and Adidas needed to start work on the club’s jerseys for the next season, Interbrand had less than a month to get its ideas together. Rather than something that looked like a soccer crest, it designed a logo that had “more in common with Google or Apple or Nike,” Grimaldi said.There would be no depiction of a charging bull, as there had been on every version of the crest for more than a century. There would not even be a crest, as such: just a sleek and stylized J, a design that would form the centerpiece of and inspiration for an updated visual identity. That was no accident. “The whole strategy was to widen the spectrum of activities without abandoning the club’s core, which is football,” she said.To present the idea to the Juventus board, Interbrand made a short film, one that offered a glimpse into what this bold new future might look like: that stylized J emblazoned on cafes and hotels, adorning events, used in collaborations with cutting-edge fashion brands. The Juventus executives, including Agnelli, were thrilled, Grimaldi said. This was precisely the sort of sea change they had been seeking. The main response, she said, was: “Wow.”The club, of course, knew such a drastic change would not be universally welcomed. When the new logo was revealed, the reaction from fans was — at best — mixed. Juventus felt it had no choice but to ride out the storm.“We needed a new identity that could change the perception of Juventus among different stakeholders,” Ricci said. “One that could enlarge the scope and potential targets of our business. We needed a new identity that was suitable not just for core customers, but for new audiences, something that could be a trigger for creators.”Perhaps the best measure of its success came on Tuesday. After a similarly intensive design period, Inter Milan — Juventus’s fierce domestic rival — presented its own new crest, a simplified version of the badge that has graced the club’s jerseys for decades. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.The soccer entertainment complexFew clubs can match Manchester United’s revenue off the field.Oli Scarff/ReutersFor years, Manchester United has been held up as soccer’s gold standard in converting the sport’s unparalleled popularity into cold, hard cash.The partnership model it pioneered, combining 25 official club partners with a jumble of regional partners around the world, might have made it an easy target for satire — all those tractor and noodle endorsements — but it has also turned the club into a financial powerhouse, capable of earning a profit even during the coronavirus pandemic.Increasingly, though, the consumption habits of younger people are making that approach seem outdated. “We’re seeing a move away from the licensing model,” Wise said. “We know that Generation Z and millennials hate being sold to. That means it’s no longer enough to plaster a club’s badge on something and assume fans will buy it out of loyalty.”Instead, he said, partnerships must feel “authentic,” and the content used to promote them must “tell stories.” That authenticity was the logic behind the Juventus rebrand, not only of its crest but of the club’s whole visual persona, from its social media — using a bespoke font — to its branding.“It was about placing soccer in the broader entertainment framework,” Ricci said. “We see our competition not just as clubs, but things like the gaming industry.”For partners, the appeal is obvious. Soccer has a reach that no other aspect of culture can match. Cristiano Ronaldo has more followers on Instagram than anyone else on the planet. Lionel Messi might trail his rival there, but it will be some solace that he is, at least, ahead of Beyoncé.Cristiano Ronaldo is a global brand in his own right, with 273 million followers on Instagram.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLikewise, Juventus has a name recognition that can supercharge a brand like Palace. The difference is that, increasingly, soccer has to give a little, too. It has to accept the principles of what Grimaldi called “strategic design,” the idea that design itself can change consumer behavior and expectations.“The rebrand was not a way of being cooler or more contemporary,” Grimaldi said. “It was a chance to show you understand the verbal and visual codes you have to adopt if you want to be understood in other spaces. To do work with Palace, for example, you have to adopt the design codes of their world.”It is, though, a slow burn. Four years since its rebrand, Juventus is not in a position to pinpoint any immediate financial boost, which has traditionally been the primary motivation and metric for anything any soccer club does. When looking at the club’s books, Ricci said, it is hard to isolate what is a consequence of the rebrand, and what is a result of winning trophies or signing Cristiano Ronaldo.He is, though, “absolutely convinced” that it was worth it. Internally, the new identity gave the club a sense of direction, he said. Externally, the outrage over the new badge subsided fairly quickly: Signing Ronaldo and picking up another handful of Serie A titles meant the club’s traditional fans did not feel alienated.But at the same time, it meant that Juventus had become something more than a team, something more like a sportswear brand, too.It is still occasionally possible to buy one of those original pixelated, acid green, special-edition Palace jerseys in streetwear’s thriving resale market. Prices start at several hundred dollars, far more than even the newest Juventus jersey. And how the team is doing on the field makes not the slightest bit of difference. More